‘I knew the gravity of the situation.’ NCDOT engineer slips out to join Helene rescuers
.JPG "Daniel Ross a member of the Jonathan Creek Fire Department, poses for a portrait on Friday, December 6, in Waynesville, N.C. Ross is also an engineer with the NC Department of Transportation working to rebuild I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge.")
The worst of Helene hadn’t arrived when Daniel Ross drove to work at the N.C. Department of Transportation maintenance yard in Haywood County early on Sept. 27.
As the wind and rain intensified, Ross asked the county maintenance engineer for instructions.
“I said, ‘What are we going to do? What’s our plan?’” Ross said. “And he said, ‘There’s nothing we can do until the storm subsides. It’s not safe for our guys to get out there.’ So at that point, I turned around and went back to the fire department.”
That would be Jonathan Creek Fire & Rescue, where Ross, 24, has been a volunteer for two years. The department began answering calls at 5 that morning from people trapped as the creek for which the community is named spilled over its banks into homes and businesses along U.S. 276.
Ross, a Haywood native who joined NCDOT as an assistant resident engineer after graduating from N.C. State University two years ago, didn’t tell anyone he was leaving.
“That was something I would rather ask forgiveness for than permission,” he said. “Because I knew the gravity of the situation. I could hear it on the radio, and I knew that’s where I needed to be that morning.”
Jonathan Creek Fire & Rescue was limited in what it could do. Seven of its trucks loaded with gear were trapped in the department’s station, surrounded by rushing, waist-deep water — something that had never happened before.
But with a brush truck, some pickups and one engine that one of the firefighters had managed to drive out before the flooding started, they answered call after call from people trapped and frightened in their homes.
“People went to bed the night before and it was raining,” Ross said. “And they woke up and their house was surrounded by floodwaters.”
Members of the Jonathan Creek department kept at it until after 9 p.m., as rescue calls shifted to welfare checks. But Ross was only able to help for about three hours before his boss at NCDOT called.
“The conversation went kind of like, ‘Hey, where you at?’ ‘Well, I’m pulling people out of these trailer parks along the creek,’” Ross said. “And he’s like, ‘Well, we need you up here.’”
Ross also worked until after 9 p.m. that day, and every day after for nearly two weeks. His main job at NCDOT was to coordinate damage assessments in Haywood County and help estimate how much each of hundreds of sites would cost to repair.
That first afternoon, after the rain had stopped, Ross got his first look at the biggest repair job in the region, the rebuilding of the eastbound lanes of Interstate 40 in the Pigeon River Gorge. Cars and trucks had been safely guided off the highway, but the river was still raging when Ross shot video of a place where the lanes had washed away. He is now overseeing the reconstruction work on I-40.
This story was originally published December 26, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘I knew the gravity of the situation.’ NCDOT engineer slips out to join Helene rescuers."
